softweir

[quote name='Svm420']Why is that even a rule? Seem to go against the community aspect of forums :huh:. Haven't been around long, so maybe there is some history to that rule I don't know about.[/QUOTE] I don't know about the KSP forums, but I've been on several forums where roleplaying has been put to an end. It almost invites people to break the rules, and because of this it makes far too much work for the moderators.

[quote name='razark']Please tell me how y'all say "NASA", "ESA", and "JAXA".[/QUOTE] NASA: As a word - "Naas-a". Like everybody I hear on radio and TV. ESA: Spelled - "Ee, Ess, Ey". Ditto. JAXA: As a word "Jack's-a". Ditto.

[quote name='KerbMav']... fairings are meant to reduce the drag from the payload, no? So why should a slim fairing [...] add drag ...[/QUOTE] The problem is that when there is any sideslip a long fairing creates [I]lateral [/I]drag which acts to increase the sideslip. So if your rocket drifts off prograde even slightly, a long fairing will make the drift worse - unless you have sufficient control authority to correct for this. RL rockets can get away with rather larger fairings than we can in KSP because their rockets are more rigid, and their control systems are much more sensitive and are carefully tuned to perform at the optimum for the load being carried. We in KSP have far more wobbly rockets, much slower control systems, and no ability to tune them.

What sort of plague? "The" plague is due to Yersinia pestis. This is a rather fragile bacterium which is unable to survive long outside of a host. - it can't be spread by cough and sneezes, but must be transmitted blood-to-blood by a vector such as fleas and mites. All you have to do to get rid of that is kill the host animals (pet rabbits, rats etc) and treat the human victims with antibiotics. Any remaining vectors such as fleas can be killed by dialling down oxygen levels for a few days. If you assume it is a tougher bacterium than that, then many will be killed by boosting oxygen levels. While aerobic bacteria are able to survive normal concentrations of oxygen, if you push the levels up too high then it defeats their antioxidant mechanisms a they will die of oxidative destruction of their essential molecules. It would help to push the humidity controls up as well to ensure that any bacteria remain in an active state (which makes them more susceptible), and the humidity will also help the oxygen dissolve into any biofilms the bacteria may be growing in. (Gut bacteria in humans survive oxygen saturation treatment because the gut is such a heavily anaerobic environment.) Of course, too much oxygen will increase the risk of fire, so it would be well for the hero to shut down all equipment in the affected section beforehand and allow the temperature to drop. You would have to make it clear that there were no oxygen-sensitive materials in that section - some substances will ignite spontaneously at high oxygen concentrations, but need a spark or similar to ignite them at low concentrations. Cheap aluminium foil has been known to ignite in pure oxygen with no evident source of ignition!

Might be worth knowing if he has any other mods?

Sorry to see you go Max! Good luck on all your future endeavours, and I hope you next job will be with such fun people as this one was. Perfectly normal turnover for a small, highly dynamic company I would say. Such companies tend to attract younger employees and people who want experience to go on to do something for a larger company, and such people tend to move on after a couple of years. There are a few things that are a bit unusual about Squad. A couple of their employees were working for them during a gap year and left to start their college courses; a lot of companies won't even look at that category of recruits! (Though small, startup companies are more likely to do so.) Also, Squad actively advertise when staffers move on to other jobs. So: we see more of Squad's turnover than most companies, and Squad attract young, inexperienced recruits and are happy to employ them even knowing they are likely to move on. This is a bit unusual, but not in any way bad, nor indicative of problems in Squad.

That does rather assume that the switch to Unity 5 won't cause problems. Squad have promised to try and keep the current GUI API working, but Unity 5 might just alter something that throws out the way some mod UIs operate.

Ah, joy mode! I must now go sleep so I am fit to start playing.

Earlier today.

Maybe Miro has placed the target docking port on the target ship at an angle?

Is this Unity 4 GUI? You have my deepest sympathies!

A common problem, I suggest you work your way back just 2 or 3 pages.

Or it could be a weird interaction of the two, with neither one nor the other being bugged. For instance, if the two lots of code for generating the procedural parts on load do things in different sequences, then one might be using an attachment node from the other before the node has been given its final position. This sort of bug is impossible to predict and sometimes tough to fix without heavy cooperation between developers.

"Hot. Hot. HothothothotHOTHOTHOT!..."

There are special clauses under the British Patents Act which allow the British Government to "hide" any patents that are deemed to be a risk to British Security. Indeed, there is a Civil Service agency that scans patents as they are filed, and jumps on them. I assume this law would have been used in the case of HOTOL. It is self-defeating. Companies that have patents blocked have no protection for their ideas, and therefore nothing prevents inventors in other nations where this law doesn't apply from filing similar patents. It is suspected that several agencies throughout the world watch for British patents that are filed and then disappear, and actively bring their contents to the attention of tech firms as being "interesting". Because of this several British firms now refuse to file patents in the UK, and there are cases where they have moved to other countries.

Reaction engines claim to have solved the thermal expansion problem by mounting the aerodynamic skin on the airframe using sprung mounts which will allow the skin to expand as it heats. (There will be an insulating layer between the shell and airframe.) The skin itself is supposed to be thin enough and flexible enough to absorb differences of expansion between different areas of itself. Because of this they don't have to use those fragile silica fibres the shuttle used, and they propose Skylon will use a carbon/ceramic composite shell. Whether any of this will work as intended is another matter!

Have you tried any old designs to see how well they work?

Have you ever tried to get an engineer to turn up on time? There's a strong tendency for them to get called away for more urgent work elsewhere, and all bookings are provisional on such happenings.

Alcohol acts as an inhibitor of brain function, but one of its first effects is to inhibit the areas of the brain responsible for self-inhibition. The major effect of moderate alcohol consumption is to reduce excessive self-critical inhibition, which frees up creative processes from the over-strict Quality Control that many people suffer from when they try to create. In other words, you stop worrying about how good your work is, and are free to create. The same goes for games. The self-critical areas of the brain are the most recent addition to the neocortex and are the least well-tuned and are the slowest to work: they slow the entire person down. Alcohol damps those areas down, so the older, less sophisticated areas of the brain are able to get on with the high-speed decision-making. The problem with using alcohol to assist creativity as that the effect diminishes the more one uses it, and one needs to take a higher dose to get the same "feel". As doses get larger they start to suppress coordination and the skills needed to create, and a point can be reached where the creative person needs the alcohol to create, but is too discoordinated or emotional to exercise their skills. The gamer at the same point feels he is performing as well as ever, but his mates may start to accuse him of being "too slow". A different way to lower those inhibitions is to develop one's skills and self-confidence. Musicians jam - they play together for fun, which exercises their skills and boosts their self-confidence, but does so outside of the rigours of routine practice that can create excess self-doubt. Artists doodle and sketch - they draw odd little things for fun, so they don't care whether they are good or not, but still those doodles and sketches exercise their skills and improve their self-confidence. Writers do silly little short stories or poems for fun. BTW, what sort of creativity are you involved in?

Windows? Right-click and choose Delete.

As cantab says. 10kg is the mass of the object, not its weight. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't say "I weigh 80kg", we should say "my mass is 80kg". We just get lazy and use the very-near-constancy of Earth's gravitational force as a quick-and-dirty way of measuring and discussing our mass.

I would be very interested in a Realism DLC - it feels, to me, like it would make a good "endgame" experience, after the "download all the mods!" phase that a lot of people go through when they feel they have cracked KSP. I considered Realism Overhaul, but after reading the thread was put off by some of the issues people were reporting. (Anyway, I don't think I have got to that stage in my KSP progression.)

Very nicely done! Also: welcome to the forum!

Absolutely no game sells just from the box art these days - unless it is the latest in a long-running franchise that is most likely to be bought by previous players. For everything else, the best the box art can do is to announce "here is that game you read reviews about", and to do that it has to reference the art people are likely to see in the reviews, and include review quotes to confirm that it is the same game even if the prospective purchaser has forgotten the name. Of course a few people will buy a copy on the basis of good box art that somehow tickles their curiosity, so it is worth making sure the game lives up to expectations created by the box art; but that's not a major source of revenue. I think Charle_Rogers' entry does best at referencing the reviews. It includes Kerbals, spaceship images similar to ones used in reviews, and review quotes and scores. On that basis, not only is it high quality photo-composition, it is also a very good example of workable box art. And in my view it, like several others, also manages to match the game experience as far as any box art can match KSP!

Quality stuff!